Day: December 5, 2018

Linux Fu: Turn A Web App Into A Full Program

December 5, 2018 by 68 Comments

I hate to admit it. I don’t really use Linux on my desktop anymore. Well, technically I do. I boot into Linux. Then I do about 95% of my work in Chrome. About the only native applications I use anymore are development tools, the shell, emacs, and GIMP. If I really wanted to, I could probably find replacements for nearly all of those that run in the browser. I don’t use it, but there’s even an ssh client in the browser. Mail client? Gmail. Blogging? WordPress. Notes? OneNote or Evernote. Wouldn’t it be great to run those as actual applications instead of tabs in a browser? You can and I’ll show you how.

Having apps inside Chrome can be a real problem. I wind up with dozens of tabs open — I’m bad about that anyway. Restarting chrome is a nightmare as it struggles to load 100 tabs all at once. (Related tip: Go to chrome://flags and turn “Offline Auto-Reload Mode” off and “Only Auto-Reload Visible Tabs” on.) I also waste a lot of time searching since I try to organize tabs by window. So I have to find the window that has, say, Gmail in it and then find Gmail among the twenty or so tabs in that window.

What I want is a way to wrap web applications in their own window so that they’d show up in the task bar with their own icon, but external web pages that open from these apps ought to open in Chrome rather than in the same window. If applications were outside of the single browser window, I could move them to different desktops and organize them like they were any other program, including adding them to a launcher. Hopefully, this would let me have fewer windows like this:

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Editing GameCube Memory With A Raspberry Pi

December 5, 2018 by 1 Comment

[James] has been working with GameCubes, emulators, and Animal Crossing for a while now, and while emulators are sufficient, he’d like to play on real hardware. This means he needs to write to a GameCube memory card. While there are a few options to do this, they either require a Wii or hardware that hasn’t been made in a decade. The obvious solution to this problem is to reverse engineer the GameCube memory card to read and write the memory with a Raspberry Pi.

There’s an incredible amount of unofficial documentation for every console, and [James] stumbled upon a GC-Forever forum post that describes the electrical signals inside the GameCube memory card. There’s your standard compliment of power and ground pads, along with a DI, DO, CS, Clk, and an INT pin. [James] broke out the magnet wire and soldered up a pin header to these cards. Data was then captured with a Salae logic analyzer, and lo and behold, it looked like a standard SPI protocol.

With the low-level protocol worked out, [James] checked out the Yet Another GameCube Documentation to get the main functions allowed through the SPI bus. The ‘read block’, for instance, starts off with 0x52 and an address offset. A little bit of Python on a Raspberry Pi meant [James] could read and write the entire GameCube memory card. Right now the code is a little rough, but all the work is available should you want to edit your Animal Crossing save with a Raspberry Pi.

This work follows [James]’ earlier work on getting into the debug menu of Animal Crossing, allowing him to add items to his inventory. With this latest advancement, it’s only a matter of time before we plug Raspberry Pis directly into a GameCube.

Apple II Megademo Is Countin’ Cycles And Takin’ Names

December 5, 2018 by 23 Comments

The demoscene is an active place to this day, with enthusiasts around the world continuing to push the envelope as far as the capabilities of machines are concerned. [Deater], along with a skilled team, produced this Apple II Megademo which won first place at Demosplash 2018.

The demo starts with an intentional tease, with an emulated C64 BASIC startup screen which splits to reveal the title card. White-on-blue text isn’t the easiest on the Apple II, due to palette limitations, but it’s necessary for the joke to work. The following scenes make heavy use of mode-switching techniques in the middle of drawing the screen. Single screens are made up of various sections in LORES, HIRES, and even text modes. The term “cycle-counting” refers to the fact that the demo is written to operate in a cycle-exact fashion. This is necessary to achieve the mode-switching effects and to make the most of the limited resources of the Apple II.

It’s a demo that, like many others, does the right things in the wrong way to achieve its impressive results, and is a worthy competition winner. [Deater] has kindly provided an FAQ and source code for those who wish to study it further.

If you’ve written a mindblowing demo yourself, be sure to notify the tips line. Video after the break.

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